How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower

How Rome Fell is a comprehensive account of the centuries-long collapse of the Roman Empire, covering the period from the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD to the last expansion of Justinian in 560 AD. Goldsworthy charts a middle course, reconstructing Gibbon’s “decline and fall” narrative against a more benign “transformation to Late Antiquity” theory, and being careful about using Rome as a model for contemporary Western problems, while having his cake about politics circa 2008.

The Pax Romana was one of the great triumphs of government, but the Roman Empire was also improvised, growing on top of Republican traditions and without clear mechanisms of succession. Commodus, who succeeded Marcus Aurelius, was young and had numerous personal flaws. His assassination prompted an awareness that anyone could become Emperor, and from then on there was not a decade without usurpers and civil wars.

Death by intrigue was the most common cause of death for Roman emperors after Marcus Aurelius. Being on the wrong side of an intrigue was fatal, sometimes for entire families. This caused a series of cascading failures. Emperors afraid of a rival gaining large amounts of power divided authority, with late Roman provinces and military units much smaller than previous ones. Yet this meant that the emperor personally had to respond to extraordinary challenges, like large border raids. Provinces that did not receive attention for their problems could raise usurpers. Divided authority between military commanders and the civilians responsible for logistics prevented responses.

There were no serious external rivals to Rome. Persia could threaten border provinces, but the barbarian tribes were always disunited. Rather, endless civil war sapped resources. Whoever won, Rome lost. Goldsworthy notes the perennial insufficiency of statistics, but there appears to have been a long manpower and economic crisis from the 3rd century onwards. Barbarian tribes settled inside the empire, including Goths and Vandals, were signs of Roman internal weakness. Though non-Italians were long seen as equally Roman, these tribal kings created alternative lines of authority that further weakened the central government.

In the end Rome fell because its leaders could no longer see beyond the immediate crisis, valued personal survival over institutional stability, and lost any kind of elite solidarity. Goldsworthy warns against drawing direct parallels between Rome and the present, but living through the past 15 years of American history… yikes.